Yut rolls on

What little gaming time we've had lately, we find ourselves still playing a few games of Yut before bed.  It is still oddly entertaining.  As much as we liked Sorry for its simplicity and occasional shenanigans that you have to say "Sorry" for, Yut packs all that into less than half the spaces, with some very strategic spaces where you get to move to a different track.  Plus the open-ended die rolls where you might be 10 moves behind but roll a 5-5-4-2, bump two pieces and end up a few spaces from winning.  The tables can turn quickly.  Probably a quarter of all games where one player is sure they're going to lose, things go the other way unexpectedly.  Except that we should total be expecting that by now.

We had a few cases where a player got their very last piece to the very last square only to get bumped and lose, and if you are bumped by the other player's last piece, they get to roll again because they bumped you, automatic win.  In one case, that bumped piece ended up rolling the 5-4-3 and making it all the way home next turn, casually hopping over the other player's last piece for sweet revenge.  

You can camp out by the crossroads and hope the other player has to get in front of you, or push one piece down the board hoping the other player has to enter a new piece before you do, so if they bring in a piece on a 2, you roll a 2 and take it right out again.  Or you get the perfect roll where you would normally bump a piece or two (5-3 comes to mind right away), but you have no pieces left to bring in behind your opponent to do any bumping ... so you don't get the pleasure.

You can compare your possible moves by how much jeopardy your pieces will be in ... if one move means you could be bumped only by a 1 and the other move leaves you where you can be bumped by a 2 or 3, then you're 4 times less likely to get bumped if you make that first move.

But of course, probability only says what is most likely to happen.  Calculate all you want, sometimes the other player just gets THAT roll.  You can still roll a 1, put a piece on the board, get a -1 to move it backwards to the zero space, and then any roll will move it forward off the board after that.  One of many strange quirks.

I still find it odd that I can't find any website discussing strategy for this game, or any mention of tournaments, or any mention of famous games or famously comical outcomes.  Maybe because it's a game of chance?  But it is not without positions where certain rolls open up game-changing decisions.



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